YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio – A painting by the renowned and influential artist Alex Katz has been gifted to The Butler Institute of American Art.
Titled “Amanda and Kyle,” it is now on display in the Waldman Gallery on the museum’s second floor.
The piece is a major acquisition, according to Louis A. Zona, executive director and curator of The Butler, and fills what was a glaring vacancy in the museum’s collection.
“He is a very important artist,” Zona said. “He represents contemporary American realism painting and may be the best-known living artist [of that genre] right now.”
The piece is quite large – 66 inches by 48 inches – and was selected by the artist from his own personal collection. Created in 2016, it is an excellent example of Katz’s style, according to Zona.
“He puts a lot of his personality in each piece,” Zona said, noting the artist’s work is not ultra-realism. “The figures are sometimes in colors that are not natural. They are very bold. And there is a flatness [to the bodies], not the roundness that you would expect in realism art. Katz gained his reputation by distorting that, and using flat shapes to tell the story.”
Acquiring a Katz painting has long been on Zona’s to-do list.
“We were gunning for him. For how important of an artist he is, Katz should be represented here at The Butler,” Zona said. “I thought that we would never get one of his works, and was surprised when his most thoughtful gift arrived.”
The decision by the 97-year-old Katz, of New York, to donate a painting to The Butler started with an exhibition of his works at the museum last fall titled “Collaborations with Poets.”
His son, Vincent, who is a poet, attended the exhibition. Vincent and other respected poets that the artist admires created poems based on the paintings in the exhibition and read them during a gathering.
Upon hearing about the success of the event, Katz decided to donate the “Amanda and Kyle” painting – valued at approximately $800,000 – to the museum, according to Susan Carfano, assistant to the executive director of The Butler.
“It was an interesting exhibition, and [it came to] a wonderful conclusion,” Zona said.
Valerie Carberry of Chicago’s Richard Gray Gallery represents Katz. She praised Zona and The Butler team in a note to the museum regarding the donated painting.
“Please extend my thanks and congratulations to Dr. Zona and your entire team, who deserve to be recognized for the role they played in bringing this wonderful gift to the museum,” Carberry wrote. “Alex Katz was moved by the professionalism and care shown for the presentation and installation of the ‘Collaborations with Poets’ exhibition.”
About the Artist
Katz is one of the most recognized and widely exhibited artists of his generation.
In 1928, at the outset of the Depression, his Russian émigré parents moved the family to the St. Albans neighborhood in Queens, New York City.
In 1946, Katz entered the Cooper Union Art School in Manhattan, and then studied at Skowhegan School for Painting and Sculpture in Maine.
At Cooper Union, Katz was exposed primarily to modern art and was taught to paint from drawings. At Skowhegan, he was encouraged to paint from life, which would prove pivotal in his development as a painter and remains a staple of his practices today.
The artist has said that Skowhegan’s plein air painting gave him “a reason to devote my life to painting.”
His earliest work took inspiration from aspects of American culture and society, including television, film and advertising, and over the past five and a half decades he has established himself as a preeminent painter of modern life.
His distinctive portraits and landscapes bear a flattened surface and consistent economy of line. Using characteristically wide brushstrokes, large swathes of color and refined compositions, Katz created what art historian Robert Storr called “a new and distinctive type of realism in American art which combines aspects of both abstraction and representation.”
Katz came of age between the Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art periods and began exhibiting his work in 1954. A new style of American poetry was emerging at this time, and the painter was drawn to it because of their shared interest in expressing contemporary living. He developed a deep interest in poetry, an art form whose methodologies and tactics he considered “more stimulating than painting.”
Since the 1950s, Alex Katz’s work has been the subject of more than 200 solo exhibitions and nearly 500 group exhibitions around the world. His work can be found in nearly 100 public collections worldwide, including the Art Institute of Chicago; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Gallery of Art, Washington; the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institute, Washington; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; The Tate Gallery, London; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among many others.
Pictured at top: “Amanda and Kyle” (2016, oil on linen, 66 inches by 48 inches) by Alex Katz was recently acquired by The Butler Institute of American Art.